With annuity sales down, pension enquires on the rise and new products being planned just how prepared is your Back Office for the shake up on April 6th
Leading players in the pensions sector are already warning the government that they are “not ready” for the new pensions freedoms being introduced on 6 April 2015.
The Association of British Insurers, the trade body for the multibillion-pound pension industry, says key policy detail is still missing and this will have a direct impact on its customers.
The changes in the pension market, due to come into force in April, will give up to 320,000 people each year the freedom to cash in defined contribution pension pots from the age of 55, with no requirement to turn their savings into a secure income.
“With an expected drop in annuity sales happening at the same time as a huge influx of customer queries as well as a number of new products being rushed to market, pension providers need to ensure that they are able to address this increase in volume of activity and administration,” stated Tim Taylor, Chief Marketing Officer, eg solutions.
“There is no doubt in my mind that the responsibility for this will fall on the Back Office, which plays such a critical role for customers, employees and includes a range of processes from account creation, pension processing, savings and investments, fraud and risk, customer complaints and case management amongst others. It is here that the sector must focus if it is to deliver against those three inter-related challenges: sales down, calls up and new product provision,” he continued.
Pension providers are already reporting a number of operational challenges prior to the introduction of the reform in less than two weeks time including planning and forecasting for increased enquires and processing volumes, allocating skilled resources to match expected peaks, maintaining customer service levels, quality and SLAs while avoiding compliance breach and operational risk and minimising recruitment.
The eg operational intelligence® software suite was the first purpose built back office workforce optimisation software product in the market. It has been proven to create extra capacity from existing resources through real-time work allocation, as well as reducing end-to-end processing times, eliminating backlogs and providing evidence to meet regulatory requirements. eg’s software suite was designed to address the many conflicting demands in back office processing teams and to deliver improvements in a range of factors affecting back office performance.
More than that, eg guarantees that its operational intelligence® software suite will improve performance and many of its customers have achieved guaranteed improvements in back office productivity of between 20 per cent and 40 per cent.
Taylor added: “eg has always provided a benefit realisation guarantee to companies that implement our software, and when we surveyed our customers 97 per cent said it was a decisive factor in their choice to implement.
Our software provides delivers a solution that has the ability to balance workloads, in real-time, between individuals and teams to optimise the time available. For pension providers this means that we can reduce end-to-end processing times, accuracy and meet SLA timescales.”
To receive a complimentary guide for pension providers looking to manage operational change, download at http://info.egoptimize.com/pensionspr/
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